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The Maud, a sunken ship rotting in Arctic harbour, has Canada battling Norway
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Daily Brew
A high-profile tug-of-war is underway between Norway and Canada over the sunken hulk of a ship resting on the bottom of a remote Arctic harbour.
This week a Norwegian group will appeal to the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board to overturn an earlier decision denying a permit to raise the remains of the Maud from Cambridge Bay harbour and take it back to Norway.
The three-masted sailing vessel, which sank in 1930, was a storage ship for the Hudson's Bay Company when years of winter ice finally breached the hull.
But it once belonged to renowned Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had it specially built 95 years ago to explore the Arctic and who named it after Norway's Queen Maud.
Jan Wanggaard, spearheading the effort to repatriate the wreck, is scheduled to make his pitch before the board on Thursday.
"It's very hard to understand or believe that we will not end up getting the possibility to bring the Maud home," Wanggaard told the Globe and Mail. "When you look at it in a practical way, everybody agrees that this is the right thing to do."
However, a Cambridge Bay group wants the wreck, partly visible in the shallow harbour, to stay where it is as a piece of Canadian heritage and tourist attraction for the Nunavut community.
"While we don't deny the importance of the Maud to Norway, one also cannot deny the fact that she is a Canadian archaeological site that has been there since 1930 and should not be removed," reads an online petition circulated by the group Keep the Baymaud in Canada, referring to the renamed ship.
Amundsen, best known as the first explorer to reach the South Pole, designed the Maud himself for an attempt to reach the North Pole. The expedition failed in its primary aim but Amundsen used the Maud to sail through the Northwest Passage and conduct scientific research. Financial troubles forced Amundsen to sell the Maud to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1925. It was then used as a floating warehouse.
A group from Asker, the Oslo suburb where the Maud was built, bought the wreck 60 years later for $1 with plans to raise it and take it back to Norway as the centrepiece for a new museum. But last December the group was denied an export permit on the advice of an expert appointed by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, the Globe reported. He concluded that the Maud was a nationally important object and Canadians should be given six months to put together an offer to buy it.
Wanggaard is asking the review board to overturn the ruling so the Norwegians can expedite plans to raise the wreck and transport it across the Atlantic on a specially-built barge. Delay would allow the ship's remains to deteriorate further.
Estimates to raise the Maud and tow it back to Norway — a 7,000-kilometre journey — put the cost at upwards of $6 million, Postmedia News reported.
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